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Gorillas may have evolved a way to beat a cheating berry plant

FOOL me once, shame on you. Fool me twice… Well, it looks like gorillas don’t get fooled twice, at least not by a cheating plant.

The fruit on the Pentadiplandra brazzeana plant is packed with a protein called brazzein, which mimics the taste of high-energy sugary fruits but is less resource-intensive for the plant to make.

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Brenda Bradley, an anthropologist at the George Washington University in Washington DC, thinks the plant is probably producing cheap, sweet proteins to “trick” primates into eating the low-calorie berries and dispersing their seeds. It seems to work, she says, seeing as the berries are sought by primate species. But now, Bradley claims, one ape is fighting back: gorillas seem to have lost the ability to taste brazzein, which Bradley thinks has evolved as part of an arms race against the plant.

Her team analysed the DNA sequence of the gene TAS1R3, which codes for a sweet taste receptor, in 51 primate species, including humans. They found that only the gorilla has two mutations that seem to prevent them from detecting the sweetness of brazzein (American Journal of Physical Anthropology, doi.org/bmk7).

Monkeys and bonobos have taste receptors primed to find the protein sweet, says Bradley. “But gorillas – who are not known to eat the plant – have species-specific mutations that likely prevent the false signal.”

This article appeared in print under the headline “Gorillas are one up in an arms race against trickster plant”